Tilt to Live

If you’ve ever felt pangs of loneliness while playing One Man Left’s addictive avoid-the-dots game Tilt To Live, then your hopes and dreams are about to be realized. They’ve just submitted an update that adds a local co-op multiplayer mode to the game. Read on for details and a fun new trailer.

The new co-op mode is a little more imaginative than just tossing an extra arrow into the fray. Instead, one player controls a turret to blast away at the invading red dots, while the other player glides around freely, collecting gems for points and ammo for the turret. Whenever the player controlling the turret dies, the roles can be switched. Mutiplayer is local only, but it works over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

There is, however, a slight catch: to get the update you must have purchased the “Viva La Turret” expansion, which sells for $0.99 as an in-app purchase to the core game. The co-op update is expected to hit the App Store by the end of the month.

Are you a master of avoidance? If someone asks you to do some household chores, do you run and hide on the roof? While you’re up there, you can work on your avoidance skills even more by playing Tilt To Live, a game where you use the iPhone or iPod Touch’s tilt controls to keep an arrow-shaped cursor away from deadly red dots for as long as possible.

While a survival-type game without a shooting button may sound boring, the developers of Tilt to Live have stuffed it with humor and personality nearly to the point of bursting. From the second you turn it on, Tilt to Live lives to entertain with quirky loading screens, control menus, and online achievements.

You have pleased the Khan.

There’s only one stage in Tilt to Live, so every time you start the game, the experience will be pretty similar at first. Some jazzy music plays as the first few aggressive red dots appear. You must avoid them and make your way to nearby powerups, detonating bombs or activating homing missiles to do the killing for you. The best powerup is a laser shot that fires just a second after you run into it, killing all red dots directly in front of you.

Tilt to Live would fail if it weren’t for the tight tilt controls, and fortunately even aiming your giant death laser with precision is a cinch. We did run into a few control snafus when holding the device upside down (sleepy mode) or at a custom angle that was also facing downward. Otherwise, the regular top-down views of the action worked perfectly, letting us guide our arrow through swarms of red dots with ease.

Purple rain.

Extremely funny achievements for killing certain numbers of enemies, and new weapons that are very challenging to unlock are the two biggest reasons to keep playing Tilt to Live in the long term. Also, the further you get, the more bizarre the behavior of the red dots becomes. At one point, they’ll turn into a Pong ball and paddles, or they’ll form tight rows and sweep across the screen in lockstep.

This game does have room for improvement. A few extra levels with different dot behaviors would be a natural fit for free or paid expansions, and we wish there was a way to skip straight to the action when you first start instead of waiting for it to ramp up each time. Otherwise, this is a completely charming non-shooter that delivers a lot of challenge for experienced and highly-coordinated gamers. Don’t avoid it– seek it out on the App Store.

You’d better start stockpiling coffee and energy drinks now, because you’ll want your reflexes as sharp as possible when the quasi-shooter Tilt to Live hits the App Store. We got our hands on a preview build of this frantic action game, and we’ve been mainlining caffeine ever since just to keep up.

You control an arrow-shaped cursor on a playing field the size of the screen, and the goal is to avoid being hit by the moving red dots that keep appearing. The controls are tilt only, making the gameplay resemble a ball-rolling game. The real kicker is that your cursor has no on-board weapons. Instead, you have to make your way to powerups that float around the screen.

Each of the eight types of powerups unleashes a different attack. One sends a swarm of heat-seeking missiles radiating outward from your cursor. Another unleashes a mighty vortex that sucks in everything that gets too close, including your cursor and nearby powerups. Perhaps the most useful one protects your cursor with a green force field, but it explodes when you take a hit.

For being nothing but red dots, the enemies have a remarkable amount of personality. Sometimes they’ll float around randomly, while other times they’ll ooze together into shapes, or line up in formations and come at you with purpose. Occasionally they’ll gel into a ball and a pair of paddles and play Pong as you try to take them out.

This is a high score game, and the action gets intense quickly. Because of this, we’re glad to see that the tilt controls feel very tight. Many times you’ll need to navigate through a fast-closing hole in the enemy line, and we never had any trouble doing it, provided our reaction time was fast enough.

Twenty achievements can be unlocked in the game, each with a funny name and description. Many of them are awarded for stringing together dot-eliminating combos. The first one, for killing five dots in a row, is called “Highest Combo Conceivable”. The second, for killing 15, is called “We lied,” and its description reads, “This is an example of a better combo.”

Some achievements reward you for playing the game differently from how you normally would. The “Conscientious Objector” achievement is for lasting one minute without killing a single dot, which is no easy task.

Three unlockable weapons become available as you play, and online leaderboards are tracked through AGON. The animation is smooth, and the graphics are crisp and clean. The whole package already has an extremely polished feel, so we’re looking forward to seeing the final version.

Tilt to Live will be submitted to Apple later this month and will cost $1.99. Now who’s up for a shot of espresso?

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